Apple cake, a special birthday movie, and making the impossible possible (7 Quick Takes)

~1~

We are still eating our way through the apples we picked last week, so I made an apple cake. Our house smells sweet and cinnamony, but this beautiful cake only used six apples. We still have plenty left.

~2~

We celebrated our older son’s 15^th birthday on Thursday. He had one birthday wish, to go see the newest Marvel movie on his birthday night, since it was being released the next day. My husband took him to see the movie, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Thank you to Disney or Marvel or whoever was responsible for the excellent timing of that release.

The movie night pushed the official family birthday dinner to the next night, which meant the celebrating bled into the weekend.

I love birthday celebrations. And, although perhaps I should be lamenting that he’s getting older—and I do cherish those younger years—I have to admit that there’s something wonderful about these older, calmer birthdays.

~3~

My sister Maureen and her children sent our son a Clearly Impossible Puzzle. All the pieces are translucent, so there is no picture to create, and you don’t know whether the pieces are even turned right-side-up.

He initially told me it had six pieces that looked like corners, but apparently two of them must not have been corners since the puzzle is done.

I like a puzzle, but I don’t know how I feel about a clearly impossible puzzle. Still, the birthday boy solved it about 24 hours after he opened it.

Some people can do what is clearly impossible. Maybe we all can.

~4~

I started my job on our son’s birthday 14 years ago, but we didn’t know about him yet since we were matched with him a couple of months later—and adopted him just after he turned 2. Then my sister and brother-in-law got married on his 5^th birthday, so that day is a day of many beginnings—all good ones.

I made it to Mass that day, and when the priest invited us to share intentions aloud, I couldn’t even speak. There were so many people I wanted to pray for that I couldn’t pick just one.

~5~

THe almost-birthday boy and I went to a special spaghetti dinner for moms last week at his high school, and at the end of the dinner, the boys stood and raised their hands over us and prayed a blessing over the moms. That would have been enough to make me emotional, but they prayed for “mothers all around the world.”

I have a feeling that the person who wrote that phrase was just thinking it would be nice to pray for all mothers everywhere. But I felt as if God was smiling with me, knowing that we were praying for a birthmother on the other side of the world who would be so proud of her son.

~6~

The other night I took our younger son to a faith formation class, and I stayed in the church parking lot to get some writing done while I waited for him. As I was working, I was thinking about how lucky I am to be able to write anywhere.

When I graduated from college, my first two jobs were in newspaper reporting. I had to learn to work in noisy, chaotic places. I would work in my car or wherever I could find a space to pull together what I needed for a story. It was kind of crazy, but I wasn’t always near an office, so you had to make do. And I’ve relied on that many times since then.

So often you find yourself picking up skills, not knowing how or when you’ll need them. But you almost always come back to them and put them to use in a new way. You never know how God is preparing you for the future.

~7~

I went to visit my friend Jaime at a craft fair this weekend. We have known each other since kindergarten at St. Pius X School in Towson, and I love following her career as a creative—and appreciate her enthusiastic support of my writing, too.

Everyone should have a friend who is a creative counterpart, someone you can bounce ideas off of, someone who is constantly trying to stretch and grow creatively.

And everyone should have a friend who goes way back to the beginning, who can commiserate about first-grade horror stories and parenting wonder stories and everything in between.

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